On Christmas Eve that year, we visited my grandfather in his room at a nursing home atop a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River. A picture taken there shows him bedridden and surrounded by his five children and two grandchildren. My cousin and I are now the only ones still alive from that evening. Thirty-six years later, I went back to that spot and sat on a park bench overlooking the river, thinking about the last weeks of his life in a room just a few yards away. He lived from the age of hot-air balloon ascensions to the age of manned spaceflight. I often regretted not asking him what he thought about the obvious absence of moral progress concurrent with that remarkable technological progress.
ANGELIKA Graswald posted the above photo on her Facebook page on April 26, 2015, a few days after her “fiancé’s” kayak capsized in the icy waters of the Hudson River, resulting in his drowning. Five months ago she pled guilty to criminally negligent homicide. She sabotaged the kayak of Vincent Viafore, who would have been her third “husband,” and refused to offer him aid.
MODERNISM — that “synthesis of all heresies” — embraces ugliness. It insists upon ugliness. It cannot produce anything but ugliness. See theextensive commentary at Novus Ordo Watchon the nativity scene at St. Peter’s Square as a prime example of the in-your-face ugliness of religious modernism:
All in all, we may say that this “Nativity” display looks more like a scene from hell, and that is no accident. Always keep that in mind: This is all deliberate. Things like this do not just happen; they require official approval and are planned long in advance, and every detail is thought through and prepared carefully. The Vatican authorities could have made this Nativity scene as beautiful as the world knows how, and yet this is what they chose to present. Think about that.
The conclusion is inescapable: The ugliness, the repulsiveness, the twistedness of it all, is by design. These wicked Vatican Modernists are simply seeking as much as possible to distract from the Birth of Christ and render it repulsive to people, especially to children. Would you let your sweet little ones look at, much less approach, this travesty of a Nativity scene? What child would not be frightened and disturbed? As their impressionable little minds and vulnerable, tender souls draw near to the Christ Child to love, thank, and adore Him, they’re being repelled by all these grim-looking, frightening characters, not excluding nudity — and the poor children will associate this with Christmas going forward. One shudders to imagine what the Baby Jesus will look like once He is unveiled. [cont.]
IN 2009, Kathryn Nurre sought to perform an instrumental version (without lyrics) of the Ave Maria by German composer Franz Biebl at her public high school’s graduation ceremony. The superintendent of Everett School District in Washington state declared that the piece could not be played because of its religious meaning. The United State Court of Appeals for the Ninth District upheld the superintendent’s decision and the United States Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal. It’s not surprising really. After all, what if students were to hear something so beautiful and ethereal it made them question all they had learned (and not learned)?
“I would teach children music, physics, and philosophy; but most importantly music, for the patterns in music and all the arts are the keys to learning”. ― Plato
Biebl actually composed the piece, an arrangement of portions of the Angelus prayer and the Ave Maria (the Hail Mary), for a secular function. A fireman in the Munich area approached him in the early 1960s and asked for something for his fire company’s choir.
It was common for companies, factories, police and fire departments, etc. to sponsor an employees’ choir, which often would participate in choral competitions and festivals with other similar choirs. This fireman asked Biebl to please compose something for his fireman’s choir for such an occasion. The result was the Ave Maria (double male choir version). [Source]
But is there any part of our lives that is truly secular? Isn’t it right and good? That men who went into the face of danger took time from their lives to honor the greatest woman who ever lived and seek her supernatural aid?
Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis peccatoribus, nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen.
Perhaps if Biebl had written a different sort of piece — maybe “Hail Mighty Justices! Hail Ruth! Hail Sonia!” — it would be acceptable in America’s public schools. Though too dangerous for public school students, Biebl’s Ave has gained popularity in this country since it was introduced here by the Cornell University Glee Club in 1970. Performances by the male choral ensemble Chanticleer, such as the one above, are especially popular.
AS I in hoary winter’s night
Stood shivering in the snow,
Surprised I was with sudden heat
Which made my heart to glow,
And lifting up a fearful eye
To view what fire was near,
A pretty babe all burning bright
Did in the air appear;
Who, scorchèd with excessive heat,
Such floods of tears did shed,
As though His floods should quench His flames,
Which with His tears were fed:
‘Alas!’ quoth He, ‘but newly born
In fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts
Or feel my fire, but I!
‘My faultless breast the furnace is;
The fuel wounding thorns;
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke;
The ashes, shames and scorns;
The fuel Justice layeth on,
And Mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought
Are men’s defilèd souls:
For which, as now on fire I am,
To work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath,
To wash them in my blood.’
With this He vanish’d out of sight
And swiftly shrunk away,
And straight I callèd unto mind
That it was Christmas Day.
[St. Robert Southwell, S.J. was drawn and quartered on Feb. 21, 1595, under the reign of Elizabeth I, for illicitly saying the Catholic Mass. He wrote “The Burning Babe” while imprisoned in the Tower of London.]
MY MOTHER, who died in October, was to Christmas festivities what Alexander was to Persia and Julius Caesar was to Gaul. She could justly say, “Veni, vidi, vici.” She came, she saw, she conquered.
She was a remarkable housewife in an age when domesticity was still a full-time vocation, not just a beautiful hobby.
By this time in the season, she would have decorated the house with fresh greens, artificial fruit and ribbons. The manger scene would be set up, and she would have done most of Santa’s work for seven children, with the help of my father, whose accomplishments included a homemade doll house and a model train set. She would be sending out Christmas cards and take us on a commuter train to see the lights and decorations in the city. On St. Nicholas Day, she made dozens of cut-out cookies and we invited friends to the house to decorate the cookies with paint brushes. Everyone took a coffee can filled with the gaudy (and sometimes downright hideous) snowmen, stars and reindeer home with them.
On the Sunday before Christmas my parents would have a party for friends and neighbors. For this event, my mother made a huge buffet of savories and sweets, all of it ready before the guests arrived. There was sesame chicken in a chafing dish with orange marmalade sauce, delicate mushroom turnovers, spiced lamb pastries, dips, nuts and cheese balls spiked with brandy and rolled in walnuts. Hundreds of cookies were lined up for battle. They included little dark chocolate tarts with currant jelly, named for some unknown reason after Tadeusz Kościuszko, the Polish military engineer who fought in the American Revolution. There were also pecan nut tassies, scotch oat cookies, spiced almond stars, thumbprints, chocolate ribbons, florentines with candied orange peel, date bars, snowdrops and the decorated cut-out cookies. [My mother did all this without servants, but she was not a domestic slave, as feminists would have it. She made sure her children did the dishes, performed kitchen prep work, vacuumed, put away the laundry, etc. We were her slaves — and we should have been! What else are children for? We usually shelled the nuts for the cookies by hand, a miserable task similar to picking cotton or working in a coal mine.]
One year, after everyone was grown and my mother continued her baking, a large can of nut tassies disappeared. We expected to find the petrified tarts for years. They had to be somewhere, but they never appeared. I still say we should have called the police.
For the party, my mother made fizzy red punch, both alcoholic and non-alcoholic versions, and dyed little cubes of pineapple red and green to put in the punch glasses. She made song sheets with carols and “jingle mitts,” little terry cloth mittens with bells on the end of the fingers. The mitts would make everyone laugh. We gathered in the living room to sing. My mother was a terrible singer and so were most of us but that was okay. Mr. Littlepage, who was aptly named (he was a printer), was the night’s only soloist. He sang “O Holy Night” with his deep baritone voice. But that was the grand finale. First my sister Clare and I sang Maurice Chevalier’s version of “Jolly Old St. Nicholas,” complete with the French accent that disguised our bad voices. And we sang all the other standards.
We then headed back to the buffet table and ate more cookies. When there are seven “growing children,” there is never enough food. But that night there was enough and there was no restriction on how many cookies we could eat. And so we ate and ate and ate. If cookies could make you drunk, we would have been unconscious. There could never be too many nut tassies or snowdrops, in my opinion. The latter are one of the easiest cookies to make. They are a traditional standard of Christmas tables. They are rich, crumbly and delicious. Confectioner’s sugar, nuts, butter — what’s not to like?
With that background to snowdrops, here is the simple recipe, courtesy of my energetic mother who gave much joy to others at Christmastime: Read More »
THE FASHION industry deprives women of clothes that are both beautiful and modest. That’s what makes this Vogue cover of October notable and extraordinary. The actress Rooney Mara is dressed in a gown that is feminine, modest and charming. The dress is also unusual because it is not a solid color. Pattern, as the blogger Kidist Paulos Asrat has argued, is eschewed by modern designers, who live in a realm of abstractions. Pattern evokes the beauty of the natural world and a cheerful view of life, instead of the angst of modernity. Read More »
from INVOCACIO AD MARIAM
— Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400)
Thou Maid and Mother, daughter of Thy Son,
Thou well of mercy, our sinful souls’ cure,
In whom God for goodness chose to dwell;
Thou humble one, yet high over each creature,
Thou makest noble henceforth our nature
That no disdain the Maker had of kind
His Son in blood and flesh to clothe and wind.
Within the blissful cloister of thy sides
Took man’s shape the eternal love and peace,
That of the threefold world both Lord and guide is,
Whom earth and sea and heaven, without cease,
Still praise; and thou, Virgin from all flaw secure,
Bore of thy body — and remained a maiden pure —
The Creator of every creature.
Assembled is in thee magnificence
With mercy, goodness, and with such pity
That thou, that art the sun of excellence
Not only helpeth them that pray to thee,
But often times, of thy benignity,
Full freely, ere men to thine own help appeal,
Thou goest before, and dost their souls heal.
[Transl. Johann M. Moser
Excerpt from “The Prologe of the Seconde Nonnes Tale” in The Canterbury Tales]
THE curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a hand. Not the curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his back, but those to which his face was addressed. The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.
It was a strange figure—like a child: yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium, which gave him the appearance of having receded from the view, and being diminished to a child’s proportions. Its hair, which hung about its neck and down its back, was white as if with age; and yet the face had not a wrinkle in it, and the tenderest bloom was on the skin. The arms were very long and muscular; the hands the same, as if its hold were of uncommon strength. Its legs and feet, most delicately formed, were, like those upper members, bare. It wore a tunic of the purest white; and round its waist was bound a lustrous belt, the sheen of which was beautiful. It held a branch of fresh green holly in its hand; and, in singular contradiction of that wintry emblem, had its dress trimmed with summer flowers. But the strangest thing about it was, that from the crown of its head there sprung a bright clear jet of light, by which all this was visible; and which was doubtless the occasion of its using, in its duller moments, a great extinguisher for a cap, which it now held under its arm.Read More »
Herein lies, however, for millions of souls, the supreme temptation because they live in a world where the word “glory” has become almost meaningless. It still exists in the dictionaries, it is still used at times in familiar language – for example, in the names of cities, streets or hotels, or on cigar labels like Glória de Cuba. Other than this, it could almost be said the word is dead. And, with its disuse comes the disappearance of other words related to it: honor, prestige, decorum …
It would be interesting to read a newspaper from 100 years ago to see the role that these values had, then, among people, families, social groups or nations. Today, one opens a newspaper and usually reads about men joining together or fighting for other reasons: exports, imports, foreign exchange, tariffs and the like.
It falls on the proud and the humble, the arrogant and the shy, the successful and the incompetent, the rich and the indebted.
Snow is undiscriminating. It lands on the heads of snow lovers and snow haters. An invisible painter, working only in white, reaches out with his brush. He dabbles on the car, on gloves, on the wings of chickadees, on industrial wastelands. He erases the outlines of the world with his dissolving medium. John Ruskin, the 19th century art critic, wrote, “Pictures of winter scenery are nearly as common as moonlights, and are usually executed by the same order of artists, that is to say, the most incapable.” Perhaps, but who can compete with the original artist?
Emily Dickinson explains:
It sifts from leaden sieves,
It powders all the wood,
It fills with alabaster wool
The wrinkles of the road.
It makes an even face
Of mountain and of plain, —
Unbroken forehead from the east
Unto the east again.
It reaches to the fence,
It wraps it, rail by rail,
Till it is lost in fleeces;
It flings a crystal veil
On stump and stack and stem, —
The summer’s empty room,
Acres of seams where harvests were,
Recordless, but for them.
It ruffles wrists of posts,
As ankles of a queen, —
Then stills its artisans like ghosts,
Denying they have been.
We cannot hold up our hands and stop it from falling. We — and the roof over our heads — are part of the canvas.
